Duplicate Page Content

[HandyRealtySA]

Hey Moz Community,

Newbie here.  On my second week of Moz and I love it but have a couple questions regarding crawl errors.  I have two questions:

1.  I have a few pages with duplicate content but it say 0 duplicate URL's.  How do I know what is duplicated in this instance?

2.  I'm not sure if anyone here is familiar with an IDX for a real estate website.  But I have this setup on my site and it seems as though all the links it generates for different homes for sale show up as duplicate pages.

For instance, http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78258 is listed as having duplicate page content compared with 7 duplicate URLS:

http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78247
http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78253
http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78245
http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78261
http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78258
http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78260
http://www.handyrealtysa.com/idx/mls...tonio_tx_78260

I've attached a screenshot that shows 2 of the pages that state duplicate page content but have 0 duplicate URLs.  Also you can see somewhat about the idx duplicate pages.

rel="canonical" is functioning on these pages, or so it seems when I view the source code from the page.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

skitch.png

[TheOSGVault]

Seeing your problem in an SEO viewpoint, it’s always best for a website not to have any duplicate content. So maybe try linking to the source of the listing on the IDX website.

Your rel="canonical" is in place and in the section where it needs to be.

The duplicate content maybe coming from what you are not doing, but what other similar sites are doing.  How many other real-estate sites use the same identical keyword and description for the same listing as you?  These similar listings on "other sites", could be the cause for the duplicate content issues on your site. I guess my question would be how many other sites have a house listed @ 20615 Wild Springs Dr, San Antonio, TX 78258 (MLS # 1034019) using the same address and description as you?

My understanding this is a common problem with IDX, not sure if this solves your problem, but may solve why you are having a duplicate content issue.

[DavidLee]

Campaigns have a 90% tolerance for duplicate content. This includes all the source code on the page and not just the viewable text. So if a URL is at least 90% similar in code to another URL, this warning will appear. Although the pages in question are may appear to be different on the front end, they are actually duplicates based on this percentage (at least the example URLs I checked in your campaigns.)

You can run your own tests using this tool: http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php

We don't know what standard Google uses, but it's safe to say they are a bit more sophisticated than us - so you might be okay in this regard as long as you have a couple hundred words of unique text per page. Google won't say how much duplicate content is too much, so we like to be better safe than sorry.

Hope this helps!

[HandyRealtySA]

Thanks for the responses.

I used the page checker and is shows most of the IDX pages are 98% similar.  This can't be good.  I've posed the question to my IDX provider and await their answer.

With regards to the similar pages that show 0 duplicate URLs, what can I do to look into this?  These seem to be non-IDX pages, so I could likely do more to fix the error in these pages.

Thanks again!

[DavidLee]

Can you provide me with a couple of pages that are similar but not flagged as a duplicate?

[HandyRealtySA]

http://www.handyrealtysa.com/category/blog

http://www.handyrealtysa.com/contact-us

http://www.handyrealtysa.com/stone_oak_real_estate_statistics

http://www.handyrealtysa.com/homes-near-bush-san-antonio-texas

[DavidLee]

The contact-us page re-directs to a different URL (about-us/contact-us) but the original source code for just www.handyrealtysa.com/contact-us matches http://www.handyrealtysa.com/community & http://www.handyrealtysa.com/resources which has no content in the main area.

While a high percentage can be considered duplicates, our crawler will also take into account the main content area to see if anything matches there as well which in the above links are different outside of the navigation and header.